This unique and famous annually up-dated guide to the wines of Australia has 12,000 entries covering 1,400 wines from 360 makers.
Available as a 372 page superbly printed 5 colour pocket-sized book. The current edition is the 20th (2003) published in August 2002.
Each wine listed is ranked out of a maximum of 5 stars by author Robin Bradley (including some superb wines which earn the Gold Star status - among the great wines of the world), and each vintage of each wine is rated by the winemakers out of a maximum of 7.
The makers also stipulate the ideal year to drink each wine, and there is a dollar value calculated for every entry (except where the ideal time to have drunk the wine is prior to now).
Over 800,000 copies in all editions have been sold, an indication of how indispensable the Gold Book has become to wine lovers since the first edition in 1979.
About the Author
Robin Bradley was born to a musical family on St Valentine's Day in 1937.
His earliest experiences with wine were at the family's Sunday roasts, where all the children were given a glass of wine and water, the proportions of the former increasing and the latter decreasing as the children grew older.
After matriculating at the age of 15, he found that Melbourne University would not accept him until he turned 17, so he studied to be a concert pianist.
Lack of talent, he says, intervened, and after a succession of jobs which included delivering groceries and teaching piano, he joined the A.B.C. writing talks and programming.
During this time he was accepted as a member of Les Amis du Bon Vin, a small but intensely dedicated wine-tasting group, a chapter of which he later started during his 4 years in London.
Returning to Australia he started a wholesale wine business specializing in small vineyard wines in 1972.
Out of this increasing preoccupation with wine grew the idea of a huge international wine exhibition, and Expovin was born. He co-organized eleven of these exhibitions in Melbourne and Sydney, a task that necessitated many visits to winemaking areas in France, Germany and the USA.
By this time he had written many magazine and newspaper articles on wine as well as appearing on TV and radio programs, so a book was inevitable.
The first book appeared in 1977 - "Three Days of Wine" - edited transcripts of the 1976 Expovin seminar, to be followed a year later by "The Australian Wine Pocket Book", which sold 24,000 copies.
The idea of the unique "Wine Vintages" series of books came to him when he sought a format wherein there was less opinion and more referable fact.
The wine drinking public's remarkable acceptance of the concept appears to have vindicated his belief in the superiority of data over verbiage.
There are now twenty editions of the Australian Wine Vintages books with total sales now well over 800,000. Other books include two editions of "Small Wineries of Australia".
Compilation, publication and marketing of the Gold Book, as it has become known, now takes up most of his time, apart from that which he devotes to his hobbies of playing piano, composing music for his daughter Louisa and painting.
He is looking forward to producing the 25th edition in the year 2007, after which he intends to drink some of the product on which the book is based.
